Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 17, 2026
Digital Home-Monitoring of Patients after Kidney Transplantation: The MACCS Platform
Published on: April 12, 2021
The Effectiveness of Mobile Phone Text Messaging in Improving Medication Adherence for Patients with Chronic
Roghayeh Ershad Sarabi1, Farahnaz Sadoughi1, Roohangiz Jamshidi Orak1
1Health Information Management Department, School of Management and Medical Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IR Iran.
Context:
Medication non-adherence is a commonly observed problem in the self-administration of treatment, regardless of the disease type. Text messaging reminders, as electronic reminders, provide an opportunity to improve medication adherence. In this study, we aimed to provide evidence addressing the question of whether text message reminders were effective in improving patients' adherence to medication.
Evidence Acquisition:
We carried out a systematic literature search, using the five electronic bibliographic databases: PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and the Cochrane central register of controlled trials. Studies were included on the basis of whether they examined the benefits and effects of short-message service (SMS) interventions on medication adherence.
Results:
The results of this systematic review indicated that text messaging interventions have improved patients' medication adherence rate (85%, 29.34). Included in the review, those who had problems with adherence, or those whom text messaging was most helpful had HIV, asthma, diabetes, schizophrenia and heart disease (73.5%). The period of intervention varied from 1 week to 14 months. The most common study design was randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (66%) carried out in the developed countries.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrated the potential of mobile phone text messaging for medication non-adherence problem solving.
